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Summer has held a very pleasant string of memorable evening solo practices.
Lightening and rain and stars and moon; the calls of invisible birds flying overhead in the night; intelligent raccoon stares along with those of the cotton-brained, near-blind opossums; a thousand breaths and a million thoughts polishing the mirror of the mind's eye and its semi-stone, semi-fluid, placeholder. The night before last was cold and I can hear Winter's voice singing in the wind. The seasons flow on to a new phase of their dance.
Earlier this month I committed to writing out a detailed log of my training, but after a few days, I amended this goal to focus on my warm-up exercises (ame no torifune undo, furi tama, and ibuki undo, most specifically). I'm still tracking things, but instead of focusing on the list of behaviors, I'm focusing more on developing the habit; of not needing the props of paper and pencil to make the list happen.
So far this month I have missed one of my evening practices. I've been enjoying a developing sense of solidifying to the routine of hakkushu, furi tama, ame no tori fune undo (which includes furi tama between the 3 sets), ibuki undo, and again furi tama. I've averaged close to 45 minutes or so. I'm usually spending the majority of the time on ibuki undo and transferring that feeling to doing shomen uchi (which I might describe as a focus on "age"/raising and "sage"/dropping).
In ibuki undo I'm focusing on relaxing and reaching in symmetry about my hara;
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Managed to get to the dojo today and train. I was late, as usual, which is a little tiresome when it's an established pattern, but c'est la vie...Gambatte and all that. At least I actually made it.
The last week I've been focusing on my connection to the Earth, primarily through standing and moving breathing practice. What that mostly means is that I paid more attention to how my feet were feeling, trying to get the sense of my knees transferring weight straight down. Any tension I feel in my knees I try to relax and adjust my feet and hips accordingly to allow for it. However, it was interesting for me to note that I woke up with tender feet today. I'm not sure if that's because I ran too hard Thursday (we had an awesome downpour which absolutely demanded my boys and I go running around in the back yard) or I put too much tension into my feet yesterday while I was practicing. Whatever the case, they were sore and I showed up just in time to do bokuto practice on the little island that formed out in the river. It's covered in river rocks which usually don't bother my feet at all, but today I felt every little pointy bit, eve when that "point" was just a smooth "corner." After a few cuts I managed to get my ki relaxed and it wasn't so bad. Walking through the river back to the embankment was a nice refreshing massage for them.
We did a little more bokuto work inside, working on negaeshi uchi before getting to work on taijutsu. I bounced my sword onto my partner's finger
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